Your hands seemed always too small
To crush between them
Like indigo dust
The entirety of my heart
Turned to chalk
Yet so you did
A hundred times in preparation
Causing a dysrythmia of fits and starts
As a bullet will pierce and find its worst punctuation
I felt your hands
Reaching inside me and clasping my beating muscle with eagerness
Turn to calcified rock, that which adored you
Just as once you swam within my cove
A lone mermaid, protected by gentle shore and salinity of my devotion
It took too long to become aware
Of that ache and trespass
The stranger in your eyes hurling goodness out the door
An unmade resonance of your own heart
Beating further and further
Away from me like castaway beacon
For something precious, we hardly wish to give up upon
We make excuses for the continued lack
The savage dearticulate rending of gentle emotion
As this grave beseachment, that you stay with me here in this place we created
When you felt the same and held me tighter than hands borne in storm
Will cling to wreckage
I
Never let you go
I
Held on by stitching myself to you
Skin pulling against skin
Submerged and blind I feel for your shape
So dear to me and known over all the world
You who has shucked your hide and flown
As molting cicada will leave behind
Crusty exterior without whole
I was fooled by the echoes of love
And your words you gave, without conviction
I saw in your eyes the truth burning
Indifferent to me and my existence
I was no more to you than
A knot to be undone and placated
I do not know why
You could have brought the knife out and sunk it to the hilt and twisted until
That cry escaped me
as you longing to … will fight the urge to disclose
Your transplant
Why stay and pretend?
Your hands not touching me, hold by your side like wooden plough
Eying furtile crescent of low sheering moon
I am not an earth capable of disgorging life
My land is barren without your kindness
The sun turns me to whitened parchment
I write with scarlet fingers
Of your abandoned nourishment
The ebb and flow before all fluid is lost
No more the cascading ocean
Cresting high with furious need
To hold me once more, horses of foam arching overhead
I ran to the shoreline and saw your sail
Catching first gust and with all mighty exhale
Smile toward the sun, the relief of the free
Unchained from us, I hadn’t known or perhaps refused to own
How you sought your release
Shining like a newly forged key on the operating room of my transplant
No more beating heart
No more the sound of you, rushing in my blood
We amputate pain if we are strong
But I am no warrior
It is the mark of how deeply I felt
I wear my scar
A red ribbon down the middle of my chest
Where you reached, where you existed
Where you left